


In the Meantime

by JennaCupcakes



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-15
Updated: 2015-05-15
Packaged: 2018-03-30 17:44:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3945847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JennaCupcakes/pseuds/JennaCupcakes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nightingale visits Peter in the hospital after he got buried under the tube station.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Meantime

**Author's Note:**

> This was done as a response to a series of prompts on tumblr by maple-clef. I had yet to try my hand at some RoL fic (something that is not obscure German wizard headcanons put into fic form...) and so this happened. Thank you to maple-clef for the prompt.

Thomas Nightingale drives up to the hospital in a state of dread that won’t quite settle. Tells himself it’s not his fault about a thousand times over, he knows the moves by now, and none of them ever bloody work. He’s still agitated, with itching hands, all the way up to the third floor where he has been told by the overworked receptionist they are keeping Peter. 

It’s his fault. 

He should have taken better care, but the events leading up to Peter getting buried under the station were so maddeningly out of his control that he could have done everything differently and still ended up in the same situation. At least he is pretty sure of that.

Peter should have taken better care.

So anger is better than blaming himself, definitely, because it means shifting his focus on something besides the tiring routine his brain goes through trying to determine where he could have gone differently. Anger means he might actually get somewhere, because his anger always drove him, has done so since. Since. He tries not to think of the war too often nowadays - it makes for very confusing moments otherwise, split seconds where he wonders how much time has really passed between 1945 and now. 

Lesley is there when he gets to Peter’s room. She gets up when she spots him in the doorway - from what he can tell from her posture she’s tired, and she’s also been eating Peter’s grapes. He can tell by the half empty plastic container on her lap, but she has her mask on. Which is curious.

“Sir,“ Lesley says, “The nurse just came in. They say he’s probably going to sleep off the sedative for a while now.“

Through the holes in her mask, Nightingale can see her watching him almost carefully. He realised the hand not wrapped around his cane is balled up in a fist and tries to relax it carefully.

“This was careless.“

He tries not to look at Peter’s sleeping form, because somehow seeing the bruises makes it worse, in the way that it suddenly all gets very _real_ \- Peter could have died down there, because Thomas didn’t take proper care. 

“As if you could have expected anything else from him,“ Lesley replies with a snort, but in a fond way. She, too, is relieved, Nightingale can tell that much.

“What about Agent Kumar?“ Nightingale asks. 

“He got out unharmed. I guess he can consider himself lucky that he doesn’t share Peter’s uncanny ability to get himself into a really tight spot.“

Nightingale really wants to thank some higher entity that they found Peter on time, but he’s really not one to believe in miracles, and besides, this hardly looks like one. Just like another last-minute-rescue that could have gone better. 

For lack of a better option, he sits down on the chair next to Peter’s bed. Lesley sits down again as well.

“Walid already checked him, if you’re wondering. Told me there’s nothing seriously wrong with him. He also said to tell you Merry Christmas, and asked that none of us get hurt until he’s back from visiting his family.“

Lesley ponders the grape box on her lap, then seems to decide it’s not worth the effort of taking her mask off and puts the box aside. Thomas can still only glance at Peter. 

So what if it’s his fault.

He steels himself and really looks, and Peter seems surprisingly okay except in the way that Thomas and Lesley are both talking and he hasn’t even so much as stirred. He keeps trying to imagine the closed room of being buried in the ground under a tube station and fails, but he’s seen enough people deal with trauma to know that it’s never pretty, and he finds himself hoping that Peter will be okay. Because if he’s not, than that might be on Thomas.

“Have we heard anything helpful from Agent Kumar about what happened down there?“ he asks.

Lesley shrugs in reply. “I haven’t. I think he’s still being kept busy with his own medical checks. I don’t know where they brought him.“

There’s nothing to do here, really, but he can’t just get up and leave. He feels like there is a responsibility he’s somehow failed and has to make up for now, but he doesn’t know how. He’s never been good at this, hospitals, not since. Since. It always unsettles him when he realises that he keeps thinking back to the war more and more often these days. He’s very sure he doesn’t like the implications of that.

Lesley watches him for a while, out of the corner of her eye, and then dozes off with her chin on her chest. Peter is still fast asleep, his chest rising and falling evenly, and his eyes firmly closed. His skin looks darker against the white hospital sheets, and for a split second Thomas wants to reach out and touch Peter’s hand, just to reassure himself that the skin will still be warm, that Peter’s alive and well and _fine_. 

Actually, he does reach out. 

Peter’s hand is indeed warm, radiating a dry heat and the slow pulse of blood through his wrist. Thomas recoils almost immediately, feels like he’s intruding but oddly calmer at the same time. 

He gets up again, straightening out his shirt and picking up his staff. He leaves Lesley sleeping, because it doesn’t seem likely that she’ll be leaving anytime soon, and so deserves the little rest she can get. Thomas, too, will try to rest, maybe after a tea from Molly with something a bit stronger. He’ll see about that.

He leaves the hospital, and lets the noise of traffic drown out any lingering feelings of guilt. 

If Peter were here now, he’d tell Thomas that it’s not his fault, that Peter’s disappearance under the station is a statistical implausibility but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. The probability of a given even is determined by the amount of possible events in the probability space, but the probability of the probability space occurring is always one. Something _has_ to happen, and sometimes the outcome isn’t what you wanted, but that’s it, things move forward from there, too. 

Except Peter probably wouldn’t say this, it sounds much more like something Thomas might have read in one of Newton’s works, if Newton dealt in stochastic. Thomas isn’t actually sure. 

He gets back in the Jag, for all it’s worth, and then puts his head to the steering wheel for a minute or so, and just breathes. 

Some days it really does feel like he carries the world on his shoulders. He tries not to feel too guilty for having hoped that Peter might be able to bear some of that weight. 

 


End file.
